help with texture crawl in Carrara 8.5...
protovu
Posts: 194
Help, Please!
I am using Michael for a simple animation which focuses on his head in profile, moving slightly, and chewing.
These movements are causing his head face and neck to look like he is made of crawling ants.
I have tried eliminating bump maps from shaders, disabling bump in render, changing lighting. No luck.
Does anyone know of a setting I am not adjusting, or any other setting? I can upload an animation snippet if helpful.
Thank you for your help,
Rick
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It would help to know what version of Carrara you're using as there was some changes in the shader room. I'm thinking the addition of mip-mapping or something in C8 or the C8 beta, but I'm not sure as I still use C7.
Hi Evil,
I am using 8.5.
I just rendered out with the following settings, which seemed to help :
Anti-aliasing on "Best",
Object Accuracy at .05,
Shadow Accuracy at .05,
and Light Quality on "Best".
My next move will be to render oversized, perhaps 150%, and then downsize
in the video editor.
Still interested in other ideas, if anyone has them.
Rick
Look at the shader setting to see if it defaults to mip-mapping. I think it would be under any channel that uses an image map. As I said, I don't have 8.5, but I have read about some issues with it, though usually it's with backwards compatibility- Creating scenes in the Beta and then trying to open them in 8.1.
Hi Evil,
The shader texture settings were defaulted to "sampling" for both the color texture map, and the bump texture map.
At your suggestion, I have tried the mip-map setting. It is a little better, but sacrifices sharpness.
I have also tried mip-mapping the bump channel. Not much advantage that I can see.
I have also tried the other options ( summed area table and gauzian). Not so good.
The mip-mapping with oversized rendering may be the best. Hope there is something better out there.
Rick
HI protovu
Can you post an image or two of what you're seeing,. or a link to a small video clip,.
Any images, screen-captures of your lighting , rendering, or shader settings can help people to see exactly what you're meaning,
Also,. Which Michael ,. 1.2.3.4.5. ?
http://www.protovu.com/texturecrawl/
Hi 3Dage,
You can download a .wmv file via the above link.
It is done with M4.
To exaggerate the problem, I set the rendering output to
Fast
2 pixel object accuracy
shader mapping on "sampling".
thanks for looking,
Rick
If texture crawl means what I think, could it be related to that whole "local space" vs "world space" (or similar wording) thing people were going on about a couple years ago?
Just a thought - probably unrelated, but ya never knows!
I took a look at your video. While I have (so far) limited experience working with animating in Carrara, I have a lot of experience animating in POV-Ray (years before). What it looks like to me is something in POV-Ray that is called "jitter."
Here is what the POV-Ray manual says about this:
"1.3.8.4 Do Not Use Jitter Or Crand
One last piece of basic information to save frustration. Because jitter is an element of anti-aliasing, we could just as easily have mentioned this under the INI file settings section, but there are also forms of anti-aliasing used in area lights, and the new atmospheric effects of POV-Ray, so now is as good a time as any.
Jitter is a very small amount of random ray perturbation designed to diffuse tiny aliasing errors that might not otherwise totally disappear, even with intense anti-aliasing. By randomizing the placement of erroneous pixels, the error becomes less noticeable to the human eye, because the eye and mind are naturally inclined to look for regular patterns rather than random distortions.
This concept, which works fantastically for still pictures, can become a nightmare in animations. Because it is random in nature, it will be different for each frame we render, and this becomes even more severe if we dither the final results down to, say 256 color animations (such as FLC's). The result is jumping pixels all over the scene, but especially concentrated any place where aliasing would normally be a problem (e.g., where an infinite plane disappears into the distance).
For this reason, we should always set jitter to off in area lights and anti-aliasing options when preparing a scene for an animation. The (relatively) small extra measure quality due to the use of jitter will be offset by the ocean of jumpies that results. This general rule also applies to any truly random texture elements, such as crand."
The thing is that I don't know what Carrara has that is similar to an "anti-jitter" setting.
Something you might try is to actually REDUCE some of the quality settings - e.g., set object and shadow accuracy to 1 or even 2 pixels. Sometimes the right direction is the non-intuitive way.
Hope that helps.
FD
It might also be the compression settings. Have you tried rendering to an uncompressed format?
Evil producer is spot on as usual :)
This is due to the compression, plus the high detail of the texture maps./ (lots of fine stubble)
So,.. you have high detail texture maps, and high quality rendering settings,. which are being obliterated by the compression of the video codec, which,. because it's reducing the image to base blocks of colours,.(rather than individual pixels) you're loosing that high detail, and in this case, the compression change in each frame is highlighted as the blocks of colour are changing slightly on each frame, and most of the image (background an figure) is relatively static,. only the head / face/jaw, and the hand are moving,. which emphasises the compression more. if you look really closely at other parts of the figure,. you'll notice the slight change in the image blocks in the entire image
You could try using a different compression codec,. r adjust the compression setting to a higher quality but,. I'll assume that will mean re-rendering your animation from Carrara, ...If you've selected AVI as the output format, and WMV as the codec,.. rather than a sequence of frames.
Render out your animation as a Sequence of images,. for example PNG sequence,. will give you a high quality image, and Alpha channel, if you need that for compositing with a background,.
Use a video editor to load the numbered sequence of "Frames" ,..then add sound,. effects, image toning etc,. and export to whatever Video format you need.
If you get compression issues at that point,.. it's much easier and faster to re-export from the video editor,. using a different compression codec, than it would be to re-render each frame of your animation in Carrara (if you've selected AVI as the output format),
Thanks for posting the clip, it really helps to see what's happening
Hope it helps
Hey all,
I may be corrected here but drop that Anti-aliasing down to 'Good'.
In the past i have done quite a few comparison renders and the benefit
of 'Best' over 'Good' is so slight when you consider the considerable
increase in render time. The difference in render time is quite surprising.
Just a thaught.
No argument from me regarding the render times. Especially considering it's an animation. The twinkly looking effect isn't caused by the render settings though. I believe it has more to do with the video compression.